International Visitors to Atomic Insights

A few days ago, I posted a map overlay of the US visitors to Atomic Insights for a thirty day period. One commenter asked for information about international visitors. Here is a screen capture of one of the useful reports provided by Google Analytics about Atomic Insights. During the past 30 days, visitors from 98…

Open, Direct Competition Between Natural Gas and Nuclear Energy In UAE

The UAE is one of the world’s most richly endowed oil and gas producers, but it has recently signed a contract with a consortium of South Korean manufacturers to build 4 large (1400 MWe) nuclear power plants to supply the electricity baseload in the country. This decision is completely rational. The UAE has a growing,…

Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin Caught Lying to the American People on Fox News

Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com Several weeks ago, Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin called a vote of the Vermont Senate on whether or not to give the Public Service Commission permission to issue a certificate of public good for the continued operation of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station. One of the premises underlying…

Visits to Atomic Insights From Every State in the US During Last 30 Days

I am not terribly obsessive about checking Atomic Insights stats, but I happened to notice the below overlay indicating that there was at least 1 visitor from every state in the United States – plus the District of Columbia during the past 30 days. (The actual tabulated stats indicated that the lowest total was 3…

How much tritium leaked from Vermont Yankee before the leak was stopped?

A good friend asked me the title question for this blog during the week. The question intrigued me enough to encourage some digging and computations. I would be interested in any questions that you have about the assumptions. Based on reading a number of different articles and checking through the tables provided by the Vermont…

Vermont Health Department Reports One Leak Source Found at Vermont Yankee; All Samples For Isotopes Other Than Tritium are Natural Background

The Vermont Department of Health has a well organized page detailing the results of the search for the source(s) of tritiated water leaks at Vermont Yankee. It includes regular updates, site maps and detailed sample results. Based on an update dated March 5, 2010, a remotely operated pipe inspecting vehicle has helped workers discover a…

Science Friday Segment on Innovative New Nuclear Projects – Including Mini Nuclear Power Plants Like Hyperion

On Friday, March 5, 2010, NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow focused on new nuclear technologies. The guest list included, John (Grizz) Deal, CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, Scott Burnell, public affairs officer of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Richard Lester, professor and Department Head of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and Lester Brown,…

American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist On Marcellus Shale Opportunities

On September 23, 2009, John Felmy, the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute (API) spoke at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA about the vast opportunities that the API sees for developing the shale gas that is buried about 6,000 feet below the surface. Warning: Felmy is a self-admitted boring economist, but…

Betting for consumers on the volatile price of natural gas

Decision makers in the regulated part of the business of producing electricity have short memories when it comes to the behavior of natural gas prices, but long memories when it comes to the potential for nuclear power plant construction costs to get out of hand. They publicly worry about the “bet the company” proposition of…

Details about mPower from Powergenworldwide.com and Chris Mowry

PowerGenWorldWide.com has published a fascinating interview with Chris Mowry, President and CEO, Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) Modular Nuclear Energy titled The mPowerTM Modular Reactor. The conversation goes into significant detail about B&W’s design decisions, target market, engineering constraints, and desire to make use of its vertically integrated North American manufacturing base. Here is a sample…